Free Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido

fascinated by his preening beauty, which borders upon the physically repulsive in its narcissism. Although he takes the precaution of undressing in the dark I am aware of grotesquely enlarged male parts in silhouette, as you get in Aristophanes, tied on for ribald effect. As my mind connects, suddenly, with what the biology teacher told us about erectile tissue in the reproduction of the rabbit, I realise, with relief, that this is routine. There is no difficulty of access and no pain. Just a comforting and unremarkable filling of a gap. Easier than one’s first tampon. John, presumably, experiences the additional pleasure of confounding Jacob’s prohibition. In the morning, he drives into London and drops me off at the Hampstead underground station before going on to his office.
    â€˜I’ll be in touch,’ he says.

Fourteen
    My mother had missed me. That was obvious. And I had not given her a thought.
    â€˜Did you have a nice time?’ she said.
    â€˜Yes,’ I said.
    â€˜What did you do?’ she said. I had been deflowered in a hotel room and had taken blackberries from the hand of a beautiful young man who played the violin and routed the Holy Ghost. I had seen a human placenta and a new-born baby. I had learned about crochet hooks and copper clamps in the cervix and egg yolks in the soup. I had found an older woman to emulate and admire in place of my mother.
    â€˜I watched Ava Gardner on the telly,’ I said.
    â€˜Is that all?’ she said.
    â€˜I went to the seaside in Brighton,’ I said.
    â€˜I missed you,’ she said. My mother gave me a cup of coffee which I drank on the sofa, staring across at the painting over her fireplace. A painting of a child with Murillo eyes weeping a contrived glass tear. To my mother this sweat-shop Woolworths oil painting said Childhood. I had never been able to compete with its posey guile. I asked myself reproachfully why one glass tear should be more acceptable than another, as I thought of the Goldmans singing Dowland. My mother would go to the ends of the earth if I lay dying, and once did.
    â€˜It was my professor’s house,’ I said, loosening up excitedly. ‘The one who interviewed me. His wife had a baby last night. She had it in the bedroom. It got born in their bed.’ Between the lines of what I said my mother read the message. The message was rejection, and it made her hostile.
    â€˜What next?’ she said tightly. ‘When you get to having a baby you’ll realise the place to have it is in hospital.’ My mother’s house appeared to me confiningly neat and ineptly contrived. She went in for that style of interior decoration which ought, given the evidence, to have induced epilepsy in its profusion of optical effect. A confusion of conflicting patterns on floor and wall. On the floor, autumnal patterned Axminster carpet. Patterned, my mother said, because it wouldn’t show the dirt, but since our activities were restricted to those which would not create dirt, there was never any dirt to show. Cleanliness dominated our domestic lives, as I remember the Hoover factory – that imposing period piece – dominated the outer reaches of London. Displayed behind me on the wallpaper, which my mother called ‘contemporary’ (meaning to denote thereby that its design was nonrepresentational), was a more than adequate collection of bas-relief china ducks. ‘A goodly bloody third of the transatlantic migration,’ Jonathan Goldman called them once in years to come, by which time they had become smart kitsch.
    â€˜It wasn’t very polite of you to stay on when you knew the baby was coming,’ my mother said. Mothers never believe that you know how to respond to your friends. They are so concerned that you shall not go friendless through this life that they become overprotective in this respect.

Fifteen
    I never again went to bed with John Millet, though I went occasionally to